Most businesses I’ve worked with aren’t short of growth activity.
There’s a sales target. A marketing plan. A new product or service being developed. Campaigns running. Partnerships being explored. Agencies being briefed. New channels being tested.
Everyone is busy doing things designed, in some way, to make the business grow.
But ask a slightly different question – what is the growth plan? – and the answer can become much less clear.
Because a growth ambition and a growth plan aren’t the same thing.
“We want to grow revenue by 20%” is an ambition. The plan is understanding where that 20% is actually going to come from, what needs to change to unlock it and which parts of the business need to work together to make it happen.
That distinction matters.
I spent 17 years working inside agencies, where one of the most obvious manifestations of this is new business. When growth gets harder, attention quickly turns to the pipeline: what can we convert? What can we pull forward? Where is the next client coming from?
But new business is only one growth lever.
The same principle applies well beyond agencies.
For a tech business, growth might not require another acquisition campaign. It could come from improving conversion, increasing adoption of an existing product, sharpening the proposition, reducing churn or helping customers understand more of what the business can already do.
For an established brand, the opportunity might be sitting in an underperforming audience, a confused portfolio, an agency relationship that has become too executional or marketing activity that isn’t sufficiently connected to the commercial priority.
Sometimes the biggest growth opportunities aren’t new at all.
They’re sitting untapped inside the business you already have.
This is where I think marketing has a much bigger role to play.
At its best, marketing shouldn’t simply be the department responsible for generating activity. It should help connect the dots between the business ambition, the customer, the market and the commercial opportunity.
Before asking what should we do?, I think there are more useful questions:
What are we actually trying to achieve as a business?
Where could that growth realistically come from?
What is currently getting in the way?
And only then: what role does marketing need to play?
That sequence sounds simple, but it’s surprisingly easy to reverse it.
We start with the answer — a campaign, a new website, more content, a lead-generation push, a new agency — before being completely clear on the growth problem we’re asking it to solve.
And when different teams are doing that simultaneously, businesses can end up with an enormous amount of activity without necessarily creating corresponding momentum.
I’m increasingly interested in the space between growth ambition and growth activity.
It’s part of the thinking behind SUNNY. Whether I’m looking at an agency, a brand or another growing business, my starting point is broadly the same: find what’s getting in the way, uncover where the biggest opportunities lie, then work out what needs to happen to move things forward.
Sometimes the answer will be more marketing.
Sometimes it will be better marketing.
Sometimes it will be fixing something elsewhere in the business before spending another pound on marketing at all.
The important thing is being deliberate about where growth is going to come from.
Because businesses rarely suffer from a lack of things they could do.
The harder (and much more valuable) question is:
Which things will actually create the growth we’re aiming for?
When my first business fell apart it was so hard – but so valuable